In other news... what I'm reading
I've picked up Bleak House from Project Gutenberg, inspired by the current BBC production thereof, and am about half-way through. It's great, so far! It's enormously satirical, and very, very funny in places. I've only read one other Dickens novel — Great Expectations — and if I recall correctly it wasn't particularly humorous. (On the other hand, I was fifteen at the time and probably wasn't paying attention properly.)
Becky returned my copy of the Bone People, which I'm really looking forward to re-reading — that's next in the queue. After that, Steve's promised to lend me the latest (and last, thankfully) in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Shadow" series — much lighter fare. By comparison, just reading the table of contents of the Bone People was enough to remind me of enough of the story to provoke an emotional response.
I recently re-read Sophie's World, which was interesting. My philosophical positions have changed quite a bit since I last read it (chiefly because of Greg Egan's books); it's pointed out a few areas I feel like looking more deeply into. One thing I like about the book is the way a few Scandinavianisms have crept through the translation into English: the descriptions of the last day of school before the summer holidays; the description of the Major's cabin by the lake; a few idiomatic puns that only make sense if you know how it would have read in the original Danish.
Finally, I spent a weekend recently ploughing through Ken MacLeod's trilogy about (among other things) space travel, various takes on a bunch of -isms (including but not limited to the usual suspects of anarchism, libertarianism, capitalism, socialism, communism, and their pairwise hyphenated hybrids), and a fairly conservative vision of a post-singularity future (complete with vile offspring).